Gates Foundation Working With Partners To Implement Safe Sanitation

Feb 28, 2014

Brian Arbogast, director of the water, sanitation and hygiene program at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, addresses in the foundation’s “Impatient Optimists” blog what he says are “the two biggest myths in the area of sanitation.” First, “while toilets are necessary to solve the sanitation challenges we face, they alone are not sufficient. Additional systems are necessary to prevent harmful, untreated waste from being released into the environment.” The second myth “is that there are simply not the resources — human and financial — to properly build and run all of the [sewage] plants this approach would require. … That’s why the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is working with partners to find other effective approaches for reaching the billions of people without safe sanitation. … If we can get past the erroneous notions about how to provide safe sanitation to the billions of people who are going without it, then we can focus on finding and implementing the breadth of solutions that will work” (2/27).